Dweezil Zappa, eldest son of musician/composer Frank Zappa, has had to address two often-asked questions throughout most of his adult life.

1. Yes, that’s his real name

2. And, yes, the music of his legendary father has been sadly overlooked by an entire generation.

While Dweezil is perfectly happy with his own name, the 41-year-old rock guitarist is not so happy about the relative neglect of Frank Zappa. The satirical rocker, jazz-rock fusionist, guitar virtuoso, electronics wizard and orchestral innovator who died of prostate cancer in 1993 at age 52.

His iconic moustache remains in memory, while the rest of him, like the Cheshire cat, has faded.

Dweezil decided to do something about it, and in 2006 he formed the “Dweezil Zappa Plays Zappa” tour, gathering seven young musicians with the skills and desire to bring the complex, eclectic, innovative compositions of his father to new, younger audiences. “Zappa Plays Zappa” comes to the State Theatre in Easton Saturday, but make no mistake — this is no mere cover band.

“It’s easy on the outset to generalize and have people say we’re a cover band,” says Dweezil from his Los Angeles home. “But I always try to make the analogy that people don’t call an orchestra a cover band. It plays music from well-respected composers, and each performance stands on its own.” Indeed, few cover bands win Grammy Awards, as Zappa’s band did in 2009 for its performance of Frank Zappa’s instrumental jazz fusion composition “Peaches en Regalia.”

Dweezil hadn’t been idle before he conceived the idea of a tribute tour. In addition to solo albums, such as “Automatic” of 2000 and “Go with What you Know” of 2006, he has provided vocals and lead guitar for groups as diverse as the semi-fictional Spinal Tap and “Weird Al” Yankovic.

He’s hosted shows on MTV, acted in movies and television, and provided voices for cartoons, such as Ajax on USA Network’s “Duckman” series.

Such an eclectic background is almost a requirement for understanding Frank Zappa’s music. It’s often impossible to categorize, which might be one reason for its neglect. On the one hand, there’s the offbeat, anti-establishment humor combined with conventional rock and sound effects in his1966 debut album “Freak Out!” with his band The Mothers of Invention. On the other, there are pieces like “Sinister Footwear,” a constantly morphing classical opus, richly orchestrated in three movements, filled with complex polyrhythms.

“Choosing the material we wanted to focus on is always a challenge for a number of reasons,” Dweezil says. “You want to balance stuff people might have heard with something they might know nothing about. That mix of fan favorite and the obscure is what we struggle with every time we go out.

One of the first things I did was to listen to every album Frank made — that’s over 80 — to get an overview of his entire career and see how many connected themes there are and find all of the first appearances of certain things.”

A song would rarely sound the same each time Frank Zappa went on stage, with themes evolving during each concert tour. So how does one choose the “authentic” version of a Zappa composition? “What we try to do is take a fan-favorite version of a song — sometimes a studio recording, sometimes a live album version — and do the one we’re most inspired by,” says Dweezl. “A lot of times, the album version is the one no one’s ever heard played live before, because Frank didn’t play it like that, so in a way it’s like a world premiere.”

One example is “Stinkfoot” from the “Apostrophe (’)” album of 1974, Zappa’s biggest commercial success. “We do it like the album version, which Frank never did live. He played it more like a bluesy kind of song,” Zappa says. Then there’s the difficult instrumental “Don’t You Ever Wash That Thing?” from the “Roxy” album. “In a certain line, the rhythm changes by one 16th note the second time it’s played. We thought it might have been a glitch or just a one-time thing. But no, every single version of that song we listened to had that one 16th note change,” says Dweezil.

While “Zappa Plays Zappa” has on occasion featured former members of Frank Zappa’s band as guests, that was not something the group wanted to focus on. Says Dweezil, “The main thing we want people to understand is that the music, to be played correctly, just requires respect and compassion. It doesn’t require someone who was formerly in the band to make it sound right — this is music we hope will be played far into the future.”

On some tours — Dweezil is not certain about this one — Frank Zappa himself makes a posthumous appearance with the band.

Through the magic of electronic technology, the band has been able to combine vintage video footage of Zappa with separate audio tracks of his vocals and guitar. “The drummer hears a click track in his ear monitors that went along with the original performance, and we play to the drummer. Then voilà, we’re in sync. It sounds like it might as well be 1974,” Dweezil says.

The variety of Frank Zappa’s musical compositions, embracing doo-wop to the classical, requires a great deal of interpretive skill. Dweezil speaks of ace guitarists like Randy Rhoads and Eddie Van Halen as being primary influences on his own playing. But playing Frank Zappa’s music requires something more. “Van Halen and Rhoads, well, that’s very technical stuff to play, but even at an early age I realized you had to know a lot more about the fundamentals of music to play Frank’s. There are a lot more syncopated rhythms that people just don’t use. Frank was really a classical composer who used a rock band as his orchestra,” he says.

For Dweezil, the biggest unknown when he first took the tour on the road was the audience. “We didn’t know what to expect. The first year it was mostly guys older than 60. As we’ve been doing this, we’ve started to see much more of a mix of people, especially younger folks, college kids and more women. It used to be you’d see like one woman every five shows,” Dweezil says.

The sets vary from tour to tour. Says Dweezil, “This tour is unique in that our lead singer, Ben Thomas, also plays trumpet and many other instruments. So we have a lot of pretty intricate instrumental things that we’ve worked on that I’m excited about. There’s plenty of stuff the audience will recognize, but we’ll be exposing them to some new stuff as well.”

For younger audience members, the entire show might be a revelation; for older fans, it will be an opportunity to hear familiar music that rarely gets performed..

But just don’t call “Zappa Plays Zappa” a cover band.

“I know people are going to want to generalize and say, ‘oh, he’s just going to put on a moustache and pretend to be his dad and do just the hits. Who needs that? Boring! With that in mind, I just want to let the music speak for itself. Frank took his own unique path in life and nobody followed. This music is there to be discovered by any generation.”

JOHN J. MOSER has been around long enough to have seen the original Ramones in a small club in New Jersey, U2 from the fourth row of a theater and Bob Dylan's born-again tours. But he also has the number for All-American Rejects' Nick Wheeler on his cell phone, wrote the first story ever done on Jack's Mannequin and hung out in Wiz Khalifa's hotel room.

OTHER CONTRIBUTORS

JODI DUCKETT: As The Morning Call's assistant features editor responsible for entertainment, she spends a lot of time surveying the music landscape and sizing up the Valley's festivals and club scene. She's no expert, but enjoys it all — especially artists who resonated in her younger years, such as Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Tracy Chapman, Santana and Joni Mitchell.

KATHY LAUER-WILLIAMS enjoys all types of music, from roots rock and folk to classical and opera. Music has been a constant backdrop to her life since she first sat on the steps listening to her mother’s Broadway LPs when she was 2. Since becoming a mother herself, she has become well-versed on the growing genre of kindie rock and, with her son in tow, can boast she has seen a majority of the current kid’s performers from Dan Zanes to They Might Be Giants.

STEPHANIE SIGAFOOS: A Jersey native raised in Northeast PA, she was reared in a house littered with 8-tracks, 45s and cassette tapes of The Beatles, Elvis, Meatloaf and Billy Joel. She also grew up on the sounds of Reba McEntire, Garth Brooks and Tim McGraw and can be found traversing the countryside in search of the sounds of a steel guitar. A fan of today's 'new country,' she digs mainstream/country-pop crossovers like Lady Antebellum and Sugarland and other artists that illustrate the genre's diversity.